


A Hundred Thousand Credits

by panamdea



Series: Waiting for you sadness [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: X-Wing Series - Aaron Allston & Michael Stackpole
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 07:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21316771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panamdea/pseuds/panamdea
Summary: In its former life the Star Destroyer could treat hundreds, maybe thousands, of injured soldiers but today there are just two; the remnants of Rogue Squadron, floating in bacta. Asyr is already climbing back towards consciousness but Janson, only human and more fragile than his Bothan squadmate, hangs unbreathing, still cold and lifeless, his prognosis uncertain at best.After the battle of Distna, waiting to find out if there will be one Rogue Squadron survivor or two, Iella sits beside theErrant Venture'sbacta tanks and deliberately doesn’t mourn.Set after chapter 20 ofIsard’s Revenge.
Series: Waiting for you sadness [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/457999
Kudos: 12





	A Hundred Thousand Credits

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not sure that hypothermia to the extent assumed here is actually possible in vacuum, but in the Star Wars universe space is always cold. So.
> 
> ~~~~
> 
>   
_“Get recovery teams out there now!” Booster snapped at his crew. “I want every piece of debris, every body, everything. If there’s a survivor he’s worth a hundred thousand credits."_  
\- Isard's revenge, chapter 20
> 
> ~~~~

How long has it been since the _Errant Venture’s_ medical bay treated combat injuries? Iella knows that if she could make herself focus she should be able to figure it to the day. But her mind won't settle to the simple calculation, too fatigued from shock and fury, from keeping Mirax steady and the sheer effort of not breaking down herself to manage anything as trivial as arithmetic. 

In its former life the Star Destroyer could treat hundreds, maybe thousands, of injured soldiers but today there are just two; the remnants of Rogue Squadron, floating in bacta. Asyr is already climbing back towards consciousness but Janson, only human and more fragile than his Bothan squadmate, hangs unbreathing, still cold and lifeless, his prognosis uncertain at best. 

But not dead yet, Iella reminds herself. Not dead until he is warm and dead.

Because of, or perhaps despite of, Booster's yelling, chivying and general demanding -- for Wedge's sake she knows, not Corran's, even for his daughter he cannot quite bring himself to that -- the medics are doing their best work. A hundred thousand credits, even split between all those involved in retrieval and recovery, is a powerful motivation, even if Iella cannot approve Booster’s peremptory valuation of these pilots’ lives. 

A hundred thousand credits! Just a meaningless number that if she cared enough would give her all sorts of information about Booster’s business finances. But she doesn't, because not even a hundred times that sum will bring back Wedge or Corran even if it might be enough to save their friend. How could you measure the value of a life anyway? Not in credits, surely, even if that was all Booster had to hand. Perhaps by intent or by the balance of lives saved and taken? She knows how the Rogues would have weighed themselves against the civilian populations they’d pledged their lives to protect; they gave themselves up for their ideals and their oaths in the end. How would _they_ value their friend’s life now as it hangs so fragile and in doubt? If he lives, how will Janson feel about the price Booster will pay for his survival?

Even without the financial incentive the best medical care on the Star Destroyer is better than in many galactic hospitals. Some of the ship’s medics might have backstories that forced them out of mainstream medical centres but they are all, without exception, excellent at the medicine part of their jobs. Booster does not cut corners where it matters. But though the medics are monitoring Janson’s bacta rewarming treatment with what Iella is trying to read as optimism, everyone is aware that their best may still not be good enough.

And so Iella sits quietly beside the tanks and waits. 

She is good at bedside -- tankside -- vigils. She has experience here, can’t remember how many times in CorSec, and later in the New Republic Intelligence Service, she has waited by a bacta tank for a team member to recover. She doesn’t know this man the way she knew her teams, knew Corran and Wedge, but she needs to know what he and Asyr can tell her about what happened to the Rogues. 

She is quite deliberately thinking of Janson as a resource. Experience has taught her it is easier this way while his life is still uncertain. Thinking of him as anything but a witness, thinking of him as Wedge and Corran’s friend or even as Wes rather than Janson, would make it too easy to fall into a spiral of loss and grief she cannot afford. She cannot be a grieving friend until later. Now she must be nothing but an intelligence agent. 

She cannot, must not, acknowledge that she needs him to survive as another link to Wedge and Corran. That she cannot bear to loose this much more of them. 

Mirax cannot detach herself from the loss of her husband and her oldest friend and Iella would not ask her to. She will do it instead. Not just because she owes Mirax this for her part in keeping her sane after Diric’s death, but because she can. Because she must. Because this is a job she is trained to do and she owes it to her lost friends to do everything she can to find out what happened to them. Only when she knows and can lay them to rest -- in spirit if not in body since the gas giant has left them so little -- will she let herself feel their loss. 

Once she felt pride in her ability to separate her emotions from her cases. Now she wonders if it makes her some sort of monster who cannot mourn properly. 

There is no need for her to be here. She knows, logically, that if Janson is dead sitting here will make no difference. And if not, well he is too far gone right now for her presence to mean anything to him. But logic or not she cannot leave him alone. She tries to tell herself this is a purely professional concern, something she would do for anyone, nothing personal. And it is partly true. But she can’t pretend she isn’t also keeping a vigil for Wedge’s friend because he is not here to do it himself. The Rogues never left each other alone.

Until Now.

She doesn’t know if there is anyone who will be glad if Janson survives; someone who will be as overjoyed as Mirax is devastated by Corran’s death, as Winter will be by Tycho’s; someone who might salvage some vestige of joy or relief from this disaster. She hopes so. It might make her own loss somehow easier to bear. 

And what is her loss exactly? Can she admit, even to herself, that the first deep stab of pain was for Wedge, not Corran? She doesn't even know what they were to each other, but she had hoped... Hoped but not acted and now she has no right to the sharp grief she has so carefully pushed aside. Does she? 

This pain, lurking beneath the edges of her self-control, is not the same as she felt at Diric’s death. That had been a jagged devastation of guilt and shame and loss that hollowed her out, leaving her empty and hopeless. Now, without the grief she will not allow herself to feel, she is filled with restless purpose, a purpose that will overflow to rip apart whoever did this and-

But not now. Later. When both pilots have recovered -- and she must believe it will be both because she is not as detached as she pretends -- and told her what she needs to know. _Then_ she will bring justice for Rogue Squadron with all the resources of New Republic Intelligence she can lay her hands on and any of Booster’s he will lend, more than just the hundred or two hundred thousand credits he has already pledged. She will tear the galaxy apart if she must. 

That is how she will show how _she_ valued their lives. 

And then, when she has seen justice for her friends -- not vengeance, because even now, even for this, at her core she believes in justice, not revenge, just as Corran and Wedge would too -- she will mourn. 

But for now, she buries it all and sits quietly beside the tanks, and waits.


End file.
